Google has launched its Google Translate feature that allows non-English speakers to search content from the English web.

The company showed off the technology earlier this month at a company event at its corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California. But the search giant did not provide a projected launch date.

Google Translate supports 12 languages including Arabic, Chinese, French and German. Users enter queries in their native tongues, Google performs the search for the English equivalent and presents the user with translated search results.

Users clicking on a search result will be guided to a machine-translated version of the original page.

A search for the French word 'bistro' , for instance, yields bar.co.uk as the top result.

However, in a demonstration of the challenges ahead for machine translation the second result is a Wikipedia entry on air pressure, which is measured in 'bars'.